Tag: monutains

Mountain Living is an Art

Hiking to the top of the mountain is a special privilege that we are able to enjoy living where we do.  We go out our back door and hike up from 9,750’ in elevation to 10,500’.  A hiking club would label our hike as strenuous but we take out time and it actually is not that difficult.  It is a great way to spend a few hours and have a picnic on a mountain top.  The further up the mountain you go the steeper it gets until it becomes very steep but no rock climbing is needed to get to the top.

From out back door to the top takes one hour and forty minutes and to get back down the time is one hour.  While the hike is strenuous and you are huffing and puffing when you get to the top, when you stand on that weathered ridge of rock and look around you forget all the difficulty of getting there.  The vista as demonstrated in the photos is breath taking.

There is just something about standing on the very top of a mountain looking out for what seems forever that is a balm to your soul and a comfort to your mind.  Modern technology is amazing and we could see a friends house on the next ridge over and used our cell phone to call him.  He went out and even with his binoculars he could not see us standing on top of the mountain waving our arms.  Standing on top of a mountain helps you put into perspective just how small you really are by comparison.  It is an amazing way of helping you put your ego into perspective.

Go to the Wildest Places

But even across this seemingly limitless expanse, very little land is untouched by civilization. There are more than 4 million miles of public roads in the United States, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and that doesn’t count private roads, utility roads or off-road vehicle trails. Add to that 2.5 million miles of oil and natural gas pipelines and approximately 160,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, and you’ve got a landscape diced into bite-sized bits.

So the question here is, where can you really get away from it all? Away from the sounds of distant highways, from air pollution, light pollution, pollution pollution?

A good place to start looking is a 2005 map by the U.S. Geological Survey that depicts the average distance to the nearest road for every point in the contiguous states. (A point, in this case, is a 30-meter by 30-meter square.) Although the map is now nine years old, the dark green patches, signifying roadless areas, are still, for the most part, dark green.

Clustered mostly in the sparsely populated mountain ranges and deserts of the West, there are also a few patches further east where the land is inhospitable to development or protected by law: the bayous of southern Louisiana, the north of Minnesota, and the Adirondacks, for example.

Much of the dark green overlaps with federally designated wilderness, as defined by the Wilderness Act of 1964: “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

There are currently more than 750 such areas in the National Wilderness Preservation System comprising over 109 million acres—roughly 5 percent of the United States by area.

Need a refresher from the other 95 percent? We picked 10 wild places in the lower 48 states that are truly wild. Not all are federally protected wilderness, but all are places where “man is a visitor”—you included.